Devil's Tor (67 page)

For had there been the signs of a weak admiration between these two—Saltfleet and the girl—his mind, contemptuous of such a drifting together, so ignoble and unseasonable, could not be thus continuing to dwell upon the consequent defection as though a treachery. The absolute sin against friendship was not enormous. His colleague's mistakes and offences since arrival here were under fate, appearing indispensable at last: the result discharged his part in them. Nor had the intimacy ever risen quite to affectionateness, that his will to disservice (the disservice itself being resolved to its reverse) should wrench an emotional chord, humble a secret vanity. Nor was his decamping so late to represent an injury: there was little more to do, and that he (Arsinal) could do alone.

So his anger for the apostasy signified a deeper stab. … This man had been invited to service. The invitation he had accepted, the service he had professed, and in part fulfilled. But now suddenly, without declaration of war, he was transferring his allegiance to...
That
directly, which hitherto had employed them both... transferring it at once and unhesitatingly: with such a simple quietude that the notification was not intended to have been made to himself; only by the inevitable discovery of his acts. … Yet without a power in Saltfleet, this will was still nothing. He would perhaps have found himself ignoring it.

Thus his anger was on account of a challenge so swift; so formidable and bewildering. Within these hours Saltfleet had picked up some weapon, wherewith to fight a way to the predominant comprehension and last fruit of this ingliding tree of Night, throwing images and terrors before it. Magic should be such shadows cast by blackness on to the brightness of day! ... A tree, a growth, of Night: merely to
know
which, without behaviour, should bring more fame to the soul than feats for human worship. … The weapon was the woman, here, however. …

Then for himself she should be as necromantic. Had he come a day too late upon her? The crudely-expressed thought could be called almost untrue, its core of truth was so much more mystical.
Too
late—therefore losing her: but how could a woman be lost to a man, whose beauty and spirit of love were perhaps for her defence; whose sex was ... symbolic? To stop before her beauty of form, her music of voice, her very inward person and nature, was to be arrested by her womanhood. To pass through these to the ...
beyond,
was to see her not as a woman, but as a sign, a door: neither to be lost nor won. For priority in that passage should lie outside time: "a day too late" could have no meaning. The mystical core of truth in his thought, however, seemed to consist in whether the mischance of his lateness in knowing her could be a prefiguration of his supernatural exclusion. …

Scarcely he knew how her sex could be interpreted as symbolic... yet, somehow, that "one bed" of the prophecy might itself be mystical. Back through all written history, and long ages before,
Her
phantasmal corpse had sought a seeming last bed beneath the top of Devil's Tor, that then had borne another name: and such might be the reference. If this girl, this woman, were symbolical of that mysterious living-on of an ancient dead One; if in that most real sense she were herself semblance only:
thus,
it might be, the miracle without animality could occur. …

Accordingly, his anger with Saltfleet—an anger debasing itself with the rough tongue of common jealousy—was on account of this woman. It appeared from another significance; he thought it did. The very quietness of his renewed shock for Saltfleet's abrupt emergence to individuality, surely it was because it was no true shock. His recesses had been lighted by the knowledge of that emergence ever since his friend's first eccentricities were joined in one conversation to his earliest reference to a strange and noble girl in the background.
Then
had sunk into his unsleeping wiser soul how the man had strode swiftly forward. The after-shocks for his consciousness, anticipated within, held no longer the initiatory terror that had found indirect other ways up. The threat to the whole spiritual scaffold of his life was stalled.

Now was he ashamed of his so many vulgar and absurd fancies of the day, bearing on the two. How could it ever have been a shaft of eroticism so quickly, when Saltfleet, temperamentally cold to women, was without the requisite speed of eye and imagination, that came from habit: when
she
went preoccupied of heart? But an alien spirit was irresistibly drawing and troubling his associate, through this woman's immaterial person.

In the grossest fashion had he explained to himself that startling deflection for a character so essentially direct and forcible as his friend's. He had seen in it only such a sex ineptitude. Thence had sprung his false translation of an unearthlier emotion into terms of anger. For being assumed from sex, from pleasure, Saltfleet's jettison of his duties towards himself had appeared the detestable treason of a frivolous hollow nature, too long masquerading under a severe exterior.

The explanation was wrong: therefore, the anger. The explanation was wrong, because it was so manifest now that Saltfleet had become fast set in sternness, attending not at all to the woman's femininity. …

Nevertheless his own unconscious wisdom from the first concerning this man's personal advance to destiny, just as surely as it must have been accompanied and heightened by some subterranean emotion at least as vivid as anger (for it had been a shock at that deep level), so its derivative of duller surface-shock had been preceded by his anger, that was a derivative of that secret emotion, coming to consciousness more quickly, because an unorganised shapeless feeling should be finer and quicker than any thought. But anger the deeper feeling could not have been, since anger was unsustainable without the fastening upon a responsible cause. Thus a child, rather than forego its anger for a hurt, would retaliate on an inanimate post or table. A man's undersurface mine of intuitions, so much more delicate of wisdom as it was than the coarser upper working brain, could not in such an infantine way set up its bogeys in order to knock them down again. Saltfleet, acting in all these matters automatically, began to loom a figure of menace for his eyes:
underneath,
the menace might be showing as separate; lighting the man as well with its ghastly glare. Arsinal felt it was probably so.

These other supplanting shapes, then—this man in his new aspect, and this woman: seeming to betoken the rise of another curtain in so fearful a drama of the rent earthly envelope, for the displaying of another scene from which he himself should be at last absent... the picture's fancy might be both true and false. It need not be as a drama, exhibiting ranks and importances; relentlessly clearing the stage for the significant glory of the at one time unlikeliest: but rather, as an unrolling scroll of history, where phenomenal shapes should everlastingly appear and disappear, for the sake of
none
of whom would the tale be. …

Standing on this floor, in increasing dismay, from moment to moment expecting the hateful interruption of a voice, he knew himself incapable of consecutive thought, and lost his hold: but another image immediately came to him, that somehow struck him as very noteworthy and peculiar. All these reflections that had flitted through his head since the silence of the room had fallen, they were extraordinarily like those white vapour-clouds incessantly passing across the star-sprinkled black sky of the flint surface. He fancied that the similitude might be not fortuitous, but intended. Then these last thinkings of his should have been as real clouds; throwing no light on a permanence behind them, but, rather, concealing that permanence from him.

His debt was to be repaid, for instance. His uninstructed intellect could not conceive the manner of payment. But should he tear away his intellect with all its motions, in order to gaze upon the sky of reality beneath it... would not that be
—
madness
? Could the state and resolutions of madness, then, conduct him to what he had to do? ...

He kept glancing now at Ingrid. He found it just as remarkable how, during the last minutes, the entire drift of his ideas should imperceptibly have set in towards her. And truly, her simple existence having the power so (without her effort) to have transformed an inessential man, there should be in her this strong magic for the acting upon men and ideas. That her will seemed quite broken, must be a necessary part of all. It brought her away from women, like a fated one. For there was a difference between men and women in outlook. Men might see the world purely as object, but women must see it as subject-object: they themselves were the half of what they saw. Now, to contradict the law, this stricken girl was cast into so low a pit of apathy that she too should be forgetting her sex, her self, in... discovering herself, perhaps, still within a world. So, the female subjectiveness being the same with life itself, as some asserted,
she
should be near dead.

Out of her instinctive ordinary womanhood knowing no self-struggles, doubtless, had she within these few days slipped, wondering and wondering, into her unsexing dream. Impossible was it for him to conceive how she might ever return to her old naturalness. Such marks in her too easily-torn life must be ineffaceable.

She was so high, in her despair... so proudly shrinking from assistance; so content mutely to suffer: what could be upholding her? But the force that moved through her should be upholding her. Thus actually she was to be regarded as a phantom in the room. Her sex life had nearly vanished, she was hardly still a woman; her sustaining animation was one with the magnetic stream passing by way of her, between that invisible fount of all these extraordinarinesses and the persons susceptible to its hither end in time and space. If this stream failed her, she must no doubt suddenly collapse. Therefore her life was no longer anything in itself, but symbolic: stationary or falling with that of which it was the symbol. …

Through her window a spectral gleam was shining; and they three crass men had joined to shutter the window: but the shining which had found that window was over-strong for human obstruction: the ignorant proposal should be as foolish as the design to arrest the swing of a great sea tide. …

Accordingly had each in the studio with Ingrid (privately revolving his fancies, while guessing nothing of the fancies of the others, during the continuance of that queerest of long silences which a dubious phenomenon had begun and its mysteriousness for all their minds prolonged) come by a different strange road to something very like the forgetting of the girl's physical personality, in his surrender to her psychical place. And all their interminable talk for an hour or more past (each at last in his own way recognised) had been futile, even though their decision against to-morrow's Tor assembly should hold because of the obstinacy of a majority. An affair was inexorably shaping itself like the falling into place of plates of iron. Truly it was a moment of complication, when three or four moved in translating dreams, and each man believed that he alone was in one.

But Ingrid's thoughts were unimaginable. In the fading light she looked an ash-faced figure, clad in black; a still pillar of waiting tragedy. She saw nobody. She stood away from the others, sideways to them, and stared straight forward, as if heroically relaxed to whatever new shocks should befall her.

They perceived how, without any muscular hardening of her features or grimming of her eyes, she assumed under their regard the likeness of one still a woman, but a woman indescribably remote from all that in the world womanhood stood for; immeasurably unidentifiable with the frivolities, softnesses, universal modes of feeling, of women... just as though her sex, the half of humanity and all life—the clean-cut half—were itself, by this phenomenal illustration, suddenly demonstrated to be divisible into sub-sexes or halves: the feminine, and the
thing of sacrifice
; the nameless thing, pushing through the feminine in the hour of greatest need. … So with Ingrid too the feminine seemed to have dropped away like a cloak let fall. …Difficult was it for those seeing the case, to apprehend it.

They witnessed also how the paleness of her face appeared to grow whiter and brighter, until at length it shone out in the manner of a moonish lamp, while the dusk had come quickly on. But two of the three men watching knew to what direction that radiance should point, and the intuition of the third supplied his ignorance.

Thus they stood; and not a sound was uttered or a movement made before the room was lighter again; Ingrid's paleness as dull and ashy as at first. Her expression had never varied. If this contradictory change of her colour had been sign, then must it have been for the information of those seeing it, each thinking himself alone in the wonder. Clearly it had not been the outward manifestation of any internal sign to Ingrid, whose face could remain so unstartled.

Peter wished to end the silence: but, distrusting his control, he first lit a cigarette, to veil himself in its blue-white wreaths of smoke through which he looked away. Afterwards he said:

"Something must be done. We can't stand here all the evening like sculptures. This long wait can mean only one thing for everybody. …"

Saltfleet regarded him.

"What?"

"Why, perhaps you have been too hasty in improving on the idea of a meeting, and I too emphatic in inveighing against it. I have been reconsidering. … Miss Fleming's words were calculated to a delayed effect... an unknowable influence as well should be in the room. I shall stand back."

"You are now suddenly agreeable again to Mrs. Fleming's arrangement?"

"I stand out of it."

"Still, if you do only half want it, after so vehemently protesting against its notion, I think we ought to be told why."

Another smoke-cloud floated and twisted between them, while Ingrid and Arsinal continued mute, apparently unheedful of the sprung-up dialogue.